Posts by TonyJ 1641 publicly visible posts • joined 30 Dec 2010
It was a crying shame when VMware pulled seamless applications from their hypervisor. It used to work really well, too, including file type association.
That alone would be enough for most people to switch.
Take a look at WinApps - https://nowsci.com/winapps/ - it almost works well enough to be a production solution but unfortunately the quirks still don't make it quite ready (or didn't when I last tried it at the start of the year).
"...The text would usually survive but all the formatting and images would go kerblam..." so... just like opening an older format created by an MS product then? :-)
Also, I can confirm that in 2009, NATO were not mandating ODF for document sharing. Or if they were, they kept it very quiet.
I hear this so often but I genuinely never experience it. Most of my updates/reboots take around 3-5 minutes. I can count on one hand how often they've broken something and/or taken double-digit minutes to complete.
And that includes on a 5 year old laptop that had Windows 11 in-place upgraded from Windows 10 (which itself I think was was an in-place upgrade from Windows 7) and moved across to the laptop so was over 10 years old with a lot of crap/bloat/installed and uninstalled software over the years.
I am not saying it doesn't happen - I have friends and colleagues who suffer the same issues but I do wonder why it never happens to me.
Partly agree. Partly disagree.
The problem is that when you take a look at e.g. Windows 11 and compare it to even Windows 2000, it has gone off in completely the wrong direction UI-wise. (But then many people feel that so did many) Linux desktops when they switched to Gnome.
Let's look at some: Moving everything out of the control panel. What was the thinking behind this? Worse, they still haven't moved everything over yet and the way they're going, never will. Add to that, this weird idea of settings take effect immediately with no OK, or Apply buttons. But not for everything.
If I right-click a file, why do I have to then open a sub-menu to find send-to ?
Why, if I open CMD then shift left-click to open another one do I get a PowerShell terminal and not another CMD shell?
I want an OS to get out of my way. I want as few clicks of the mouse/shortcut keys as possible. This constant reinvention of it serves no purpose than to frustrate people.
Then there's the telemetry. I don't massively care about the stuff I currently understand is being sent back but I absolutely do not want any "AI" based screenshots being saved and then...well then what, exactly? We all know the answers and it's nothing to do with out security or helping us to work.
Why don't the Office Web Apps work like the Desktop Apps? Well we know why - it's the last barrier to move away fully from Windows for most people that can and would. Yes, they're great for a quick view or edit of something simple but they are a nightmare with anything complex (looking at you Excel & Word).
For me Windows 7 nailed it - it looked pretty enough without getting in the way. It was, frankly usable and did its job and you could generally forget about it. Win 11 feels like a battle all the time. And one with ever changing, ever moving targets.
I don't think envy is right, either. Yes, I do get frustrated by people who announce on a regular basis "I moved away xx years ago and haven't looked back". Great. Good for you (genuinely) but then also, you cannot comment on things you don't use daily / haven't used in anger for years and years, either and that smug tone helps no one. Though again, I do believe that there is a sense that somehow everything Microsoft does is bad but it's ok when it's anyone else. Especially if it's on *nix and open source.
Apple used to be (still are? Haven't used their stuff for a good while) notorious for blowing away backward compatibility. Google are just an insidious hoover of every bit of personal data that they can get. MS are trying to copy that so they can monetise it but I do wonder why? What are they doing with it, because improving Win11 doesn't seem to be one of the things.
And Windows Phone seemed to be a start of *really* moving away from developers, developers, developers into fuck you, we will do it our way, territory. They could have made a good third option but they chose to throw early adoptors under the buss with Version 8 not being backward compatible with v7 handsets. Fuck me. Kill your early adoptors, kill your early devs. No wonder it went nowhere.
And that final point is key. What MS don't seem to get (or care about) is that all of these little things they do add up to a massive breakdown in users' abilities to fully trust them.
"... Purchasing Nokia was not the mistake.
The mistakes happened after. Same for "here maps" and "here navigation". MS failed to make use of it, see the value, and make it viable..."
I agree. As I've said before, O2 sent me a Windows Phone (version 7 I think it was) and whilst it felt very much like it was in beta, there was quite a lot to like. The live tiles were particularly useful and the hardware itself was decent.
The biggest misstep here was when they then moved to the next version and determined that the physical button layout would change and as such if you had the previous version, you were left without an update path. That, I believe, more than anything killed it dead in its tracks. All of those early adoptors both from a user and developer perspective were simply left angry. Hell, it wasn't even my daily driver and I felt it.
And this was at a point in time where they still had a chance to make a dent in Android and iOS devices. But typical of Microsoft, they believed that they knew better and then the market proved them wrong.
Windows Vista wasn't a bad OS once you got it onto hardware that was actually capable - again, it was the marketing around "Vista Ready" machines which were anything but that gave it the most bad headlines. Oh, and the fact that if you bought the Ultimate version, the promised updates and e.g. extra games never marterialsed.
Windows 7 nailed it for me - good UI, stable, etc. 11 is stable, but the constant fucking around with the UI from what appear to be 11yo's on too much sugar and E numbers is beyond a joke. It just gets in the way. I don't want an OS that I have to stop and think about where to find basic functionality.
All very good points.
Back in the day. A looooong time ago, as part of my degree in electrical and electronics engineering, we had to do programming.
Machine code was the order of the day because the kit we were using back then didn't have anything else. We were using 6502 and Z80 evaluation boards that you had to type in via a hex keypad.
We didn't have compilers or IDE's for these things (though I did eventually write something along those lines for a project).
One of our lecturers was something else. And I mean that in a positive light. His background was R&D and designing subsystems for mainframes for the likes of ICL back in the day. His knowledge was utterly phenomenal but he also had a teaching methodology that, at the time was frustrating as all hell, but boy am I fortunate - and eternally grateful - to have had him teaching me.
He would never give us what we wanted - a straight answer. Well, actually a solution.
"What you need is in the blue/black book" <- these were the books from the CPU and board manufacturers that had all of the hex in them. Wanna JuMP? Hex xxxx - you get the idea. He might, if he was feeling particularly sorry for us, point us into the right general area of said books. But not often. It helped you find and digest the right information and sift out the irrelevant. Critical thinking skills, right there.
But also on top of that he taught us a logical approach, starting with the algorithm. If you can't get that right the rest falls short.
From the algorithm we went into flow charts. Again, he was an absolute stickler for them being accurate and flowing properly. And matching the algorithm. If it didn't one or the other (or possibly both) were wrong and needed to be revisited.
And then we got into the actual program itself. And by now, it was usually the simpler part.
So we had to learn the basic building blocks - from hexadecimal, to how the CPU's we were programming for worked, to how they did things like address the memory on the boards etc.
We had to learn how to turn a requirement into an algorithm and how to turn that into a program.
We had to learn how to debug them.
And fundamentally it taught us how to understand what we were doing, so that next time it was a bit easier and we were a bit better at it. Slow, steady, progress.
I won't say I left programming behind as it was more I never used it in anger outside of studying - the hardware got me.
But I wonder... if we could have simply used a search engine, we likely would. If we could pass it to AI we probably would.
And then we would have learned fuck all. We would have got to an answer without the journey of discovery and understanding.
If you abregate your learning to AI, don't be surprised when it uses what you're inputting as yet more of its own training data to become even better - all the while, leaving you stood on the bottom rung of the ladder with no way to make the steps upwards because you've never built a firm knowledge base of your own and the gap is widening.
Stop. Being. Lazy.
Yes, Openreach kept vacillating between coming soon and coming between 2024 and the end of 2026. Now, despite the entire area showing as green on their rollout map (which granted, does include the "currently building") it has gone to "Not available" - did so a couple of months ago.
Meantime, YouFibre (Netomnia) rolled out. Not only do I get gig/gig synchronous and a static IP for less than a third of what Virgin cost (the FTTC here wouldn't cut it - 32Mb down and 1Mb up), but they were happy to assist my swapping out their kit for my own with no headaches. And... if you take their static IP, then they do not port block, so even though for the first time in years I took a chance on a domestic, rather than business, line, I can happily self host e.g. email.
And to top it off - when I was on Virgin, I rarely saw 1/3 (occasionally maybe 2/3, but not often) of what I was paying so much for (and could never get anywhere with them), my cabled connection is topping out at 936 down and 912 up. And even wireless is hitting 700-800 down with 600-650 up.
When I have had to get support, (twice), they are quick and knowledgeable. And helpful.
But, I do know they are burning cash like there is no tomorrow so I really hope they manage to stick around.
I lead a multi (tens of) million Euro programme. The whole thing is run on Excel sheets with complex forumula, styles, macros, pivot tables, etc.
There are much better ways, but it's chronological error - i.e. we've always done it this way.
The client is often the same.
I have at least two of these tracking Excel sheets that will not even display properly in LO.
It isn't a certification in the same way as if you passed an exam - it's a recognition of contribution.
If you look back through my posts on here you will see I've said the same thing though - they have become much less a way of identifying skill and solely a revenue generator for the vendor, as can be evidenced by the rush every year to find people in partner organisations who can quickly pass the necessary exams to keep the accreditation level...
...I've mentioned before that I spent a significant chunk of my career working with Citrix products. I'd go so far as to say that at one point, I probably knew more than anyone outside of the developers (and even them, for some of the earlier iterations of what would become nFuse Enterprise, having worked with the creator of nFuse to build it).
I was CCEA number 54, (or so I was told) back in the day. You got access to a CCEA-only website. One whose entire content was simply a list of the exams you needed to pass to become a CCEA...erm... yeah.
Over the years, I contributed heavily on forums, support sites etc but got nothing back for my efforts. Not even vague recognition.
But I haven't touched it in years, now. My last big project on it was 2018 and even before that, it was a few years between them. The writing has simply been on the wall for a company who sold the ability to connect to on-premise applications over slow connectivity such as dialup.
Now you have most apps as web-apps, and/or fast connectivity into them, the whole reason to have it has slowly disintegrated. There are still a few shining lights (or were when I last worked with it) such as the NetScalers, but again...super expensive by comparison.
Why anyone these days would pay to have expensive Citrix licenses on top of expensive RDS CALS is beyond me when the latter can do 90% of the former.
VDI has never taken off to the extent the likes of Citrix hoped it would - again, it's all the complexity of thin client environment with all the complexity of a fat client OS, that requires a highly perfomant back-end, to give you what? A tiny selection of valid use cases.
They've been circling the drain for years now. All this is doing is shoving a hot poker up the arses of people who've helped to get them where they were (I won't say are, because they've fucked it up themselves) who will now move onto other things and let the death spiral accelerate.
It's a shame but it has an air of inevitability that I've called out more than once.
(Forgive me if this has been mentioned in the comments but I haven't the time to read through them at the moment).
It's trivial. And Windows copes now.
I've literally just done it moving the SSD from a Lenovo laptop to a Dell Mini Desktop for a POS* that my fiance uses.
There were no blue screens. No complaints. Nothing. It booted and just worked.
And that was using a 2.5" SATA SSD in place of the original Dell's m.2 SSD.
And it isn't the first time I've done it - not even with that particular SSD - it was originally in an aging NCR POS.
Now 20+ years ago, when you had to use tricks to inject drivers into the running OS before moving it - yeah it was a royal PITA, but not anymore.
*Point of Sale, not Piece of Shit :-)
I used to have a virtualised OpenWRT router running for a good while that was setup with an OpenVPN connection out to the likes of Surshark or Nord. I could then, as I chose, use the OpenWRT as a default gateway for as many devices as I wanted to route out via VPN only.
Nowadays I do the same thing with a tiny little GL-iNet Brume 2500A but rather than OpenVPN it's a Wireguard connection with a kill switch to prevent traffic passing if the VPN drops.
Works a treat and is tiny, low powered and their support is excellent. It died after about 18months and they not only replaced it, but as the A was the only version available (same thing but aluminium case rather than plastic) they upgraded it and paid the return postage.
Rebreathers extract the CO2 by use of a scrubber material - Sofnolime being the one usually bought. You effectively breathe the same breath through the closed loop the entire dive which is why they have no bubbles in the traditional sense of open circuit divers. You top the gas up using diluent - a breathable gas for the depth and type of dive you are doing as descend.
Our bodies only extract roughly 4% of the O2 from each breath, so you once the CO2 is scrubbed, the gas is passed over (usually three) O2 sensors which determine if, and how much O2 to reinject into the loop to keep the mixture breathable.
That's why, when you see rebreather divers, they have tiny 3l cylinders (larger can be used for expedition dives) compared to the much larger ones that open circuit divers use.
However. They can kill you in unique and unexpected ways - if you don't pack the scrubber material properly, for example, the CO2 will "channel" - after all it's a gas and will find the path of least resistance - and before you know it you are breathing in less O2 and more CO2.
Yeah... rebreather diver here.
"...These are "desktop hypervisors", just as it says in the title. This fills a different use case than a server...
XenClient by Citrix (later dropped and now available as OpenXT is a desktop, bare metal hypervisor.
NXTop was another one, but Citrix bought them and killed it off.
Type 1 and Type 2 determine bare metal or inside another operating system and have nothing to do with the type.
You know some jobs require that person to act as an interface and be on calls. That you can't understand it (or what I've already followed up with), says more about your closed mind than anything else.
Which is probably why you chose to post anonymously.
Some of it is by choice and some of it is necessary and some of it is wasteful bullshit but it's a load I take so my architects are free to get on with their jobs without being called into endless, pointless, meetings. I can protect them by taking that load over for their benefit.
There's a roughly 60/40 split customer and internal calls.
And just because they're in my diary doesn't mean I automatically attend - I manage my workload very well and have the freedom to choose what is and isn't important enough to involve me.
It's our most valuable client (in revenue terms) so that extra bit of loving is fine as far as I am concerned. Oh, and I don't work early or late except by exception and I ensure I take regular breaks, including a full hour for lunch (except again, by exception), away from my desk.
So no, the way I deal with it is far from nonsense because I don't allow to become such. That only comes about when your autonomy is taken away - like being forced into an office. I have an incredible balance to my work and work/life because I manage my own time.
100% agree.
My diary is already always 75-80% full of Teams calls. The idea of them being face-to-face meetings would be horrendous. I mean, an awful lot of them are already unnecessary but it would be worse if they were unnecessary and needed me to travel to them.
And, as I've previously mentioned, my team of 6 are spread across Europe. Myself and one other in England (but 150 miles apart), and another in Scotland so hardly easy to commute, just for the UK guys.
I get more done because people aren't stood over my shoulder wanting "a quick chat" all the time and I can simply set a status when I need to go undisturbed.
And the customer is pan-European, soon to also include APAC, so yeah, there's that as well.
I do occasionally have face to face meetings but not too often and it works.
Not every job can be done remotely but where they can, it makes a lot of sense to allow it. And that's before commuting, costs of travel/fuel/parking etc etc etc
"...DRM currently has a 0% success rate in stopping copyright infringement. Which means that the only thing it does is make life harder for legitimate paying customers..."
Exactly - remember the anti-piracy messages at the start of DVD's that you couldn't skip?
Anyone ripping them cut that entire thing, so anyone watching an actual pirated copy wasn't bothered by the hassle. Legitimate purchasers had to sit through them, though.
It's a nice idea but we're stuck with a couple of problems.
C-suites like the idea of someone (i.e. a company) that they can shout out when things go wrong. They like the idea of guaranteed support levels and things like SLA's.
Time - time is really not on their side to do this. I can tell you from experience (see my comment above) that customers are looking and looking to do something fairly quickly.
Expense & complexity. It's likely that the features that I want, aren't necessarily the features that someone else wants or the ones they want and so on. Deciding what to prioritise comes at a cost in terms of financial and time and if someone feels they aren't getting the love they believe that they're paying for, then they're likely to walk away leaving others with higher bills. There's also the question of longevity - one of the selling points of virtualisation is the ability to run up virtual machines that may have been created on versions from many releases ago. Who's to say these FOSS offerings can provide that level of longevity?
Not saying it isn't a viable option if non of the above are show stopped, but for many, I think that they will be just that.
You are correct, however, I am currently consulting with a very large pan-European client who is actively looking at alternatives, given their VMware bills are coming in at something like 8-10x what they were.
This is much more than a maybe. There is nothing in VMware that excludes them from other offerings (they don't leverage any of their expensive components). Of course that may be trickier for some consumers of VMware.
I mean you could just install Outlook for Android, or use the inbuilt one called Email, or the inbuilt one called GMail, or... yeah you make a fair point for, say the Samsung devices. Lots of repetition. And different app stores (Galaxy Store vs Play Store) which allow you to install the same app twice in some cases.
However, I just got given back an older Note 8 that I'd given my Dad, after he upgraded to an S22 (and as I've mentioned previously, he's rather technophobe). He went through the migration himself from one to the other and is happy with everything.
I decided to drop LineageOS onto the Note8. Entirely as an exercise in how to and to test e.g. banking apps in readiness for moving my own phone onto it.
And whilst it's not a process for the non-technical, nor is it that onerous. And as we often support our own families etc I'd expect most readers here to accomplish it with very little drama or issue.
The end result is a very clean OS and even with the open sourced GApps it isn't cluttered with a ton of bloat and multiple apps that all do the same thing. In fact with the version I put on, there isn't even an email client included.
All the banking apps just work (in a much, much, earlier version I tried several years ago some of them decided that the unlocked bootloader / lineage = rooted and wouldn't launch).
All the functions of the phone work (with one quirk - take the stylus out, and it reboots the phone so you can then use the stylus. Put the stylus back in and... it reboots the phone, to stop using the stylus, but given I never use it anymore it's not a huge issue for me, personally).
All of which is a long winded way to say it's a very easy to use, clear and simple interface that both looks good* and just works.
*Obviously that's to my own personal tastes and YMMV.
...was back in the very early 90's (around 1990-1991).
As part of of thesis, I had the task of building a plotter, but it had to have a function and the one chosen was to read a barcode and reprint it. Oh I had to design and build the barcode wand, as well.
I mean... really... of all the use cases, this was effectively an overcomplicated photocopier, but I digress.
The kit we were programming on was some esoteric all in one device that had a hexadecimal keypad, a series of 7 segment displays and a few limited ports - a serial and parallel if my memory serves, as well as an edge connector that exposed one of the buses.
We did have the luxury of being able to write the code on a PC which allowed us to use assembly language, then generate the hex output, and print it, but then manually input it on the keypad.
My first hurdle was the sheer size of the program itself. It wouldn't fit - the lookup table alone ran to something like 4x the available RAM on the board, so I had to design and build a memory expansion. That went onto the edge connector. I seem to recall from memory (no pun intended) that the system itself could recognise up to an additional 32kB of RAM as long as you got things like the timing and trigger circuits correct.
The next issue was that the program wouldn't fit in the application we used to code on the PC (I forget what it was - it was over 30 years ago!). So... I was given a copy of Wordstar and told to write it in that... which was kind of useless given it had none of the compile-to-hex capabilities I needed.
But given that I now had a ton of RAM spare, I decided in my infinite youthful wisdom that it would be easier to transfer the program straight from the PC rather than coding it in manually every time so I reverse engineered the original program and made it read in the Wordstar file, strip out the bits it didn't need and pipe the output into the board via serial cable. Which also meant of course I had to write the program to transfer it. I think that I burned that to an EPROM in the end to save having to type it in manually each time, which meant I kind of had my own kit.
Every character from A-Z (upper and lower case) and the numbers 0-9 was in a lookup table that was simply a series of commands for driving the stepper motors in the plotter (which was very simply an x/y and a relay to lift and lower the pen).
It all worked and it was an excellent learning experience for projects in later life and how they have a tendency to grow out of all proportion if you don't get the details right from off the bat.
I learned more about barcodes than anyone needed to know. It was actually fun for the most part - just a series of ever expanding challenges to get it working but other than being a learning exercise it was otherwise utterly pointless in practice. :-)
Remember when Windows had a last known good configuration boot?
It's a long time ago, so my memory is hazy, but I seem to recall it would boot sans newly installed software/drivers. I have vague memories of it being a bit hit-and-miss, but surely it's not beyond the realms of ability to add this [back] in?
Also I note with interest that the persistent desire to reduce/weaken/ban end-to-end encryption seems to be missing from the list. Have they finally woken up to how catastrophic that would be?
I could never quite get along with Qubes.
But if you still need bare metal on desktop/laptop hardware then take a look at OpenXT - it's what became of Citrix's Xen Desktop.
It doesn't have the app granularity of Qubes, as it separate the OS's (or did, the last time I looked into it).
https://openxt.org/
The house I am in now was previously owned by a guy who owned a local factory of some kind.
According to my neighbours, he had a handyman (one of his <cough> "engineers" from his factory, apparently).
Said handyman did an awful lot of electrical work.
And earthed absolutely none of it.
A quick list from memory (and there was much more): a 32A commando socket in the garage: earth bent out of the way at 180 degrees and no sheath; extractor fan in the kitchen (all stainless steel - nothing on the earth tabs from the motor feed), outbuildings (no earth at the fuseboard in the first building), three out of 5 sockets in the kitchen...no earth attached, no sheath.
Quick (wago) connectors used to join cables but then not put into the outer boxes, and left laying on a shelf in the outbuilding above head height.
Electric gate controller - nice, wire armoured cable down to it from the garage. Ah... someone did something properly? Nope... No earth tab in the compression gland. No earth.
Oh and one of the en-suites has an electric shower. The isolator for that... in the built in wardrobe adjacent to, but outside the bathroom - a 32A cooker type switch (fine in terms of load for the shower in use, but less so in terms of easy access).
Once I'd fixed all the earth issues etc, I replaced the old wired fuse board with a modern consumer unit and RCBO's.
I genuinely think people fail to understand how dangerous mains electricity is because you cannot see or hear it unlike gas and water.
Came to say just this. In the UK we're (currently) protected in this way with contracts.You write it so it's vague - either intentionally or not - and the benefit of the doubt goes to the other party.
In terms of insurers bad behaviour though - I was t-boned a couple of years ago. Completely the other parties fault, with witnesses to prove it.
However, their insurer tried: to say I was driving at excess speed which was a 50% contribution to the accident and then quibbled over the value of my car which was declared a write off.
For the speed, I had a tracker which showed I'd never gone above 18mph (the accident occurred within 200 metres of my home - I was taking the car to be serviced. At least I wasn't bringing it home after it had been serviced!).
In terms of the payout and valuation - I got about 85% of the value and then almost 18 months later I got the remainder.
The two payout sticking points were the value of my vehicle (as I said above) - it was a fairly unique set of factory fit features so in fairness it was hard to pin down, but they obviously wanted to low-ball it.
The other one, I can kind of see their point, though. The cost of the hire vehicle came in at something north of £50k... I only had it about 12 weeks! You could have literally bought the car.
It was all set to go to court before they finally settled out of court for an amount I never found out.
Of it all though, the thing that pisses me off the most is that even though I was the innocent victim of someone else's mistake, my own premiums went up considerably because now I'm seen as a "higher risk" driver. Greedy bastards all round.
It depends.
Of my current team, only two of us are even in England. I have two in Hungary, one in Scotland, one in Belgium, another in Germany on one is Slovakia.
The customer account I lead is based in Germany but has offices across Europe and APAC.
It makes no sense to go to an office to...have Teams calls.
Now on the other hand, if everyone were within commuting distance, it may make sense to have perhaps a day a week in the office together, but even then - probably not that frequently as there is literally nothing we need to do face to face that can't be done remotely.
Came to say pretty much this.
How come it comes as a surprise to learn that if you give people useful skills where they can be used to get a job and be self-sufficient, and with it, have greater self esteem, you see lower levels of recidivism?
Yes, punishment is a necessary component.
But treating prisoners like they are subhuman only goes on to perpetuate the issues.
You only have to look at places such as Norway to see how a prison system that is run properly can change the trajectory of a criminal's life.
Yeah... I can accept "far less likely to" but "won't" seems to just be tempting fate.
My driving miles have dropped by an order of magnitude from it's peak 20 or so years ago of an average of 1,000 a week to last year, just shy of 4,000 for the whole year which would put EV's into the more practical territory for me.
But one of the things that has put me off has been a lack of fast charging and infrastructure because whilst I would like to think that I'll never return to such ridiculous numbers of miles, there's no guarantee it won't go back up to 30/40k a year again if something like my job changes down the line.
The idea that I could park up, plug in, grab a coffee and a toilet break and be done in 10 minutes is *very* appealing. Add in the range. Add in the life. I'd be fully sold.
However, I've seen way to many battery concepts shown over the years that have never come to fruition that until such a time as I see them in a car, I'll remain cynical (and even then, I'll remain cynical about the stated life until evidence backs it up).
You still have the option of a perpetual version of Office without the subscription part.
It always surprises me that people don't seem to realise this.
It's also a little unfair to group the Office product suite of applications as a subscription whilst forgetting the other parts that come with it - Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint etc etc. all of which can help with collaboratively working and having access to your work on multiple devices.
Yes, I know there are alternatives, but they aren't baked into the Office suite and again when you are talking about general users, they want the path of least resistance.
And in fairness if you don't need those online components, then buy the latest version of Office without them (though it'll go away eventually as MS want that juicy monthly revenue stream and associated lock in).
I disagree.
Where there are finance departments - and that can be one person - there will inevitably be macros and/or plugins.
And even where they are small companies, the moment they do business with a larger one, they'll be swapping documents that have inevitable been created in Microsoft Office.
The willingness to bend the truth to fit the narrative is overwhelming on here. Most of us work in heterogeneous environments where we are faced with a mix of applications, operating systems and hardware - on premise and in the cloud. Some of you are clearly lucky enough not to do that. Great. I am glad you're happy in that world (and that is not sarcasm), but the reality is that most of us aren't so insular.
Choose the right tool for the job. It's a great mantra but when you're faced with inertia and businesses that rely on the processes they've had forever, getting them to change can be a real challenge.
One of the things that *always* gets merrily overlooked when people start down the "just use Libre Office" route is just how many corporations run on Excel macros and plugins.
Seriously, it's a bad joke that won't go away.
And some big vendors push them out regularly (e.g. SAP). Entire finance departments run on them.
I am not, in any way, saying that it is right, but it just is.
Right now, I'm involved in a programme that has one department creating roughly 1.5 of the damn things a day. Yep - 30-35 of the damn things every working month.
I am pragmatic and will use whatever OS or package is best for the job at hand, but this rabid "just don't use Microsoft" really doesn't work without a LOT of planning, a LOT of training and a LOT of migration work in the background and even then, it won't be 100% because of things like the above.
"...You can use the online version of Office on Linux, I know because I’ve done it on my laptop. I know of at least one business that doesn’t use the standalone version of Office at all. Everyone uses the online version which makes working from wherever on whatever platform much easier..."
I pity anyone who has to do this on a regular basis. I find the online version of the applications - particularly word - can screw the visual formatting and make it really difficult to work with. It also still seems to lack some of the desktop application features.
It is doable, as a workaround, but not something I'd want to do on a day to day basis. Doubly so on long and/or heavily formatted documents.
Oh, I don't know.
I was quite fond of both Vista* and Windows 7. It seemed to be time when MS were actually trying to make an OS that worked, was reliable for users by not BSOD'ing if you as much as glanced at it the wrong way and looked quite pleasant on the eye. It feels like it's been downhill ever since.
I think we look fondly on 2000 because it was the first business class OS from MS that had things like plug and pray.
*As long as you ran it on a machine capable of it, of course. All the "Vista Ready" bullshit was...well just that. Bullshit.
I was once called to a dead server which was used to run (bare metal) the AD, shares, printer queues, user profiles...well, everything.
This was for an airline. A cash rich middle eastern one.
Anyway, the UK MD had refused to pay for any kind of backup or second HDD to be RAID'ed as he felt the company were trying to rip him off. He had the same attitude to the PSU or a UPS.
There was a brownout that popped the PSU and HDD.
Having explained that everything needed to be rebuilt and if there wasn't a local copy, tough shit.
So once everything was recreated I sat down and his response to the question of "now do you see why we recommended all that resilience?" his answer was "yeah but now it's happened, it won't happen again..."
I have lots more similar stories.
About 22/23 years ago, I worked for a large manufacturer. They were a Lotus Domino/Notes shop as well as big users of Citrix (the latter being the reason I was there).
One of the young lads on the helpdesk was a bit of a prankster and often got himself into a spot of bother for acting before thinking.
This one particular day, he was called out to one of the HR managers' for some problem on her desktop.
Whilst he was fiddling around with her computer, she went to get a coffee, leaving our intrepid plank alone for a few minutes.
Did I mention his dad also worked for the company at the same site. Not in am IT role, as I recall, but he had email.
He also had a sense of humour, so when he received an email from the HR manager that read "You're fired you bald bastard!" he knew it was a joke. He also had a good idea (he'd been on the receiving end of his son's pranks before) who had sent it, so he did nothing with it.
Again, though, the genius that the kid was, he didn't delete it from sent items.]
Yeah...you guessed it. The HR manager found the email and lodged a formal complaint. Due to his other pranks it ended up being a final written warning.
It was quite funny, though.
A good 15 or so years ago I drove a good few hours for a face to face interview.
On arriving, it was in the boardroom. The table was the usual sort of thing - very long and narrow.
There was one chair on "my" side, and the two guys each sat at opposite corners which meant that I could actually see both of them so when speaking to/looking at one I was almost turning my back to the other.
From the get-go it was incredibly bad-tempered. One would start to ask me a question for the other to interrupt them. Or I'd be mid answer and they'd interrupt me.
After a short while I'd had enough. I called an end to the interview, saying I had no idea what the hell they were playing at, but thank you for wasting a day of my time but I was done with it.
I hadn't even left the building when the agency called to say they liked me and wanted to offer me the job. I explained in robust terms precisely why I didn't want it.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
